Looking inside lunch boxes
The Department of Education (DepEd) issued recently a memorandum that disallows carbonated drinks and other unhealthy food from being sold inside campuses.
The timing of the memorandum is a bit off since the academic year for public schools is ending. Moving up and graduation ceremonies are being held and students are looking forward to the summer vacation.
Yet the DepEd memorandum on a healthy food policy, issued last March 14, is laudable. It is ridiculous that schools promote healthy eating in classroom lectures, then the food sold in the campus include junk food, soft drinks, and hotdogs.
But the DepEd should not stop at campus food. It should look also into what children are bringing to school inside their balunan or lunch boxes. A canteen meal might be healthier with the recent DepEd regulation, but what a child brings to school in his or her lunch bag could contradict those rules. You’d be surprised how high-calorie the food is inside lunch boxes or bags.
Processed food like luncheon meat and hotdog, fried chicken, and fried egg are among the common items to be found inside lunch packs. Those are what the kids want, thanks to persuasive advertising by these food companies; and those are what parents could easily prepare before rushing to work. Throw some pieces of hotdog into boiling water then the frying pan and they’d be ready in minutes. Those also are the kinds of food that working families could easily afford.
Schools may impose rules on their canteens and lecture to their students about the benefits of eating healthy but they cannot ignore how meals brought to school from home aren’t much healthier than canteen food.
The memo by Education Secretary Leonor Briones is titled, “Policy and guidelines on healthy food and beverage choices in schools and in DepEd offices.” The goal is to promote and develop “healthy eating habits among the youth and DepEd employees by making available healthy, nutritious, and affordable menu choices, and for setting food standards.”
The standards disallowed soft drinks, powdered juice drinks, fatty and processed food, fish balls and other deep fried snacks in canteens in all public elementary and high schools. The alternatives, according to the recommendations, are fresh fruit juice and milk, peanuts, bananas and other produce that are high in fiber but low in fat, sodium and sugar.
This was not the first time the Education department issued such guidelines. Past administrations have imposed similar measures, with an order given almost every start of school year. Recent orders cited the 2014 National Nutrition Survey by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute that showed 29.1 percent of Filipino children aged 5 to 10 were underweight while 9.1 percent were overweight.
To succeed in its campaign for healthy eating habits, the DepEd should expand its coverage to what students bring to school as baon from their homes. Schools cannot go to homes to check on a family’s food choices but they can start looking into lunch boxes to see what students are eating.